Microsoft is Retiring Office Mix, Bringing Features Elsewhere

Microsoft is Retiring Office Mix, Bringing Features Elsewhere

Microsoft has emailed users of its Office Mix add-on for PowerPoint today to inform them that retiring the service. Instead, the firm will roll the most popular Mix functionality into PowerPoint and Stream.

“We are retiring the Office Mix Preview service on M‍ay 1, 2‍018 and need you to take action to save your files,” the email notes. “Please make sure to migrate all of your content to a storage location of your choice before the retirement date to avoid losing any of your data.”

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Microsoft introduced Mix over two years ago and presented it (ahem) as a way to turn unidirectional presentations into interactive online lessons that you can share with others. It seems to have been pretty popular with teachers and educators, trainers, and other presenters.

If you do use Mix, you can sign-in at the Office Mix website to access your content and export it or migrate it elsewhere. Those with qualifying accounts—meaning Office 365 commercial or education accounts—can migrate their content to Microsoft Stream. You can learn more about content migration here.

As for the future, Microsoft says that it will be adding the “best experiences of Office Mix” across PowerPoint, Stream, and Forms over time.

“Going forward, the new recording tab in PowerPoint will allow you to create a presentation that includes recorded slides, screen recordings, narrations, audio, ink, and videos,” the email notes. “In the coming months, we’ll be connecting Forms for interactive quizzes and Stream to the recording tab to become the new publishing experience. In the meantime, you can manually export and upload these videos to Stream or another hosting site of your choice.”

 

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Conversation 7 comments

  • Usman

    Premium Member
    20 October, 2017 - 6:10 pm

    <p>That's somewhat reassuring. My brother is a teacher, and he was using Office Mix, however they never properly updated it for Windows 10 and Office 2016, so he couldn't leverage the new inking capabilities from anniversary update on wards.</p>

  • skane2600

    20 October, 2017 - 6:37 pm

    <p>Wouldn't it make more sense to retire a feature AFTER you have provided a replacement for it rather than before?</p>

    • JudaZuk

      21 October, 2017 - 10:38 am

      <blockquote><a href="#209209"><em>In reply to skane2600:</em></a></blockquote><p><br></p><p>That is not the new Microsoft …new Microsoft seems to be all about cancelling, closing down, and killing services with promises about "better" replacements that never really are there </p>

    • Daniel D

      21 October, 2017 - 5:37 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#209209"><em>In reply to skane2600:</em></a></blockquote><p>That is absolutely true, but Microsoft isn't going to open the opportunity for a future competitor to take their market share with that thinking. Now the engineers and resources freed up from Mix can be used to dick around with Windows 10 and make that operating system increasingly annoying and unpopular with more people.</p>

      • Winner

        21 October, 2017 - 6:20 pm

        <blockquote><a href="#209416"><em>In reply to Daniel_D:</em></a></blockquote><p>Do you really think if they had so much market share they'd be shutting it down? Only shutting it down if it's not adding any monetary value. Apparently it was not so valuable to them regardless of whether it was valuable to their customers.</p><p><br></p><p>To the cloud! To the cloud!</p><p><br></p><p>There's a reason I still have all my critical data on my own hard disks (and backed up, too).</p>

  • gregsedwards

    Premium Member
    20 October, 2017 - 8:52 pm

    <p> Mix is cool, but I never could really understand how they expect you to use it with a formal learning management system. That said, it makes creating interactive presentations really simple, and the engagement metrics it can produce are pretty fantastic. I'm hopeful they'll integrate its features in meaningful ways across the other services.</p>

  • jbuccola

    22 October, 2017 - 2:42 pm

    <p>Pointless to build on an ecosystem that is being dismantled in ways large and small. The cumulative effect of this constant product pruning will translate to the cloud, where businesses will —on the margins—opt for commodity IaaS solutions over MS’ locked-in PaaS solutions, simply as a defensive move.</p>

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